- 1 part garden soil, spread in a 2 to 3 inch layer on a cookie sheet and bake at 180 degrees F for 45 minutes. This kills bacteria and weed seeds.
- 1 part peat moss - pre-moisten and sift between your fingers.
- 1 part sand - use only fine horticultural sand. Inexpensive playgound sand may contain salts. Do not use sand from the beach for the same reason.
Anything that will hold 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7 cm) of soil and that has holes for drainage will do. You can use pots, flats, special seeding trays, Jiffy Peat Pots or homemade or recycled containers. These include cottage cheese or yoghurt containers, and milk cartons split in half lengthwise (be sure to punch drainage holes in the bottoms of these). Egg cartons are usually too shallow and the cardboard ones dry out too quickly.
When re-using plastic or clay pots, wash them in a sink with hot, soapy water. Add 5% bleach for extra protection against bacterial diseases that can affect young seedlings, such as Damping Off.
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Make sure you have a mister bottle on hand. A watering can with a fine rose attachment will also come in handy.
Save some plastic bags or large sheets of plastic to form a make-shift greenhouse over the flat of seeds. Special covers for seed flats are also available, but the drawback with these is that they are often not tall enough. It is nice to have some flexibility in your fake greenhouse.
Most seeds need a temperature of about 70 to 75 degrees farenheit in order to germinate. Providing this kind of heat is easy in most homes. If you are starting only a few pots of seeds, you can place them on top of an older-model refrigerator in order to provide bottom heat until the seeds germinate. The brand-new, energy saving refrigerators are usually not warm on top. Heating pads set on low will provide a nice warm bed for one flat of seeds. Radiators and hot pipes are also good, although placing seed trays and pots above them may require some construction. Heating cables and mats are available at most garden centres. These are not cheap, but will last for many years.
After seeds germinate, they will need full sunlight, as provided by a large, south-facing window (read north for gardeners in the southern hemisphere), or some natural light with a back-up of artificial forms of lighting. For a few flats of seeds, some natural light amended with a simple light fixture with a gro-light will be good enough. Fluorescent light fixtures with one cool and one warm tube will be better, but still should not be relied upon completely.
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